5 essentials when transitioning to Continuous Performance Management

With debate around how performance review may be changing and with some organisations looking to move away from performance ratings to more continuous performance management, we offer in this blog post the 5 areas we think are fundamental when you start to consider making any changes to your performance management process.

#1 - Get involvement from everyone when mapping out the new approach

This is about consulting with employees and including them in your planning as you start to map out any new Performance Management approach.

#2 - Don’t just fiddle with the form

By all means, consider scrapping Performance Management altogether if it's not working for you, but we think that just making changes to a paper-based form by adding a new field to complete, or a new box to tick, isn't going to make anyone feel more positive about the process, or make an impact on performance. Don't just fiddle with the form, re-think and work out how to move forward.

#3 - Take a hard look at your policy on Performance Management – and change it if needed

In our experience in working organisations of differing sizes and from across different sectors, the more effective Performance Management processes seek to build-up and empower the individual. Try to find opportunities to put more accountability for the success of Performance Management in the hands of the employee - and make it a continuous performance management process and not a one-a-year meeting. This not only reflects the current shift towards greater flexibility, individual choice and personal accountability, as highlighted in our articles and webinars on the consumerisation of talent, but also moves it away from being solely an HR tick-box exercise.

#4 - Focus on the skills - not the process

The use of Performance Ratings is being debated in many organisations. If you decide having considered the options that you need to retain the rating element of Performance Management, make sure you develop managers’ skills in making these decisions. This is about helping them making accurate and fair assessments of performance, so train and up-skill your line managers to be more effective assessors - and look at how these are being used across the business.

#5 - Build in an audit of the quality of conversations

You’ll want to know the impact of the changes you have made to your Performance Management approach so plan to include a question or two in your employee satisfaction or engagement survey about this.